SURVIVOR

by William H. Benson

September 28, 2000

     Marooned on a deserted tropical island seems to be a favorite theme for writers and other story creators.  These stories promise adventure but do not always deliver.

     The first survivor story I read was The Black Stallion by Walter Farley.  Eleven-year-old Alec Ramsey finds himself on an Atlantic island with a wild black Arabian horse.  They work together, survive, and eventually Alec learns to ride the Black.  After two weeks they are rescued, and Alec takes the Black to his home in New York and rides him in the races.  It is a good juvenile story and was made into a movie in 1980 starring Mickey Rooney, as the horse trainer.

     The grandfather of all survivor stories though is Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, written two plus centuries ago.  It has all the ingredients of an adventure story.  A shipwrecked young sailor is tossed onto the shores of a desert island in the Caribbean, and there he lives for more than 27 years until he is in his fifties.  He marks the years one by one, celebrating on September 30th, the anniversary of his arrival on, what he calls, the Isle of Despair.

     After many years, a native from another neighboring island joins him on his deserted island, and Robinson names him Friday.  The two are eventually rescued, and Robinson travels back to his home in England and marries and has children.  It is a great classic, well-worth reading again.

     Daniel Defoe’s fictional Robinson Crusoe was loosely based upon a real life story–that of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor in the South Seas who quarrelled with the ship’s captain about the seaworthiness of the ship.  The captain promptly dumped Alexander off, at his own request, on one of the Juan Fernandez islands, 400 miles west of Chile.  He lived there alone for 52 months until another captain rescued him.

     Then, in the 1960’s there was Gilligan’s Island on television.  The captain and his first mate, Gilligan, aboard their boat, the Minnow, take a cruise with a professor, a movie star named Ginger, a millionaire and his wife, and Mary Ann.  A storm blows up, and they end up on a deserted tropical island.  The weekly thirty-minute shows were typical sit-com humor, but none of the cast seemed overly concerned about getting off the island.  In fact, they all got along.  Looking back at those shows, the adventure seemed lacking.

     Recently, I read that Tom Hanks has completed a new movie that will open in December.  In it he plays Chuck Noland who flys a plane that crashes in the Pacific leaving him stranded alone for four years on a tropical island.  Tom Hanks lost fifty pounds to play the role.

     Weeks ago some 40 million Americans tuned in to watch who would be the final survivor on Cutthroat Island.  One by one the participants were voted off the island until only Richard Hatch remained, and for this daring feat, he won $1 million.  Unfortunately, I was one among a select group of Americans who did not glue myself to the television to watch an episode from beginning to end.  Staring at scantily clothed Americans parade around in water on a tropical island did not catch my attention, for where was the Robinson Crusoe-like adventure?

     Despite the show’s popularity some dared to speak out against it, calling it “the basest form of human voyeurism” and evidence of “the inanity and emptiness of American television.”  One guy commented in Newsweek that “it was just a dumb game with a ludicrous prize that fundamentally was about strangers exhibiting bad manners and bad behavior toward each other.”

     A lady said, “Does anyone else have a bad taste in her mouth after watching the much-heralded Survivor finale? . . . watching the prize awarded to that smirking, arrogant Machiavellian antihero by the very people he despised and manipulated was a bitter pill.  Survivor II?  Think I’ll pass.”

     Fred Friendly, a former television executive, years ago commented on the quality of American entertainment.  “The television and movie industry makes so much money at their very worst; why would they ever want to be their very best?”

     For Alec Ramsey, Robinson Crusoe, and Alexander Selkirk, survival was about finding food, water, shelter, and a way back to civilization, but for Richard, Rudy, Kelly, and Susan, it was about shrewdness and duplicity and winning at a hokey version of office politics played out in knee-deep water on their own Isle of Despair.  And where was the adventure in that?

A FAREWELL ADDRESS

by William H. Benson

September 14, 2000

     On a Thursday in mid-August, President Bill Clinton stood before 4,500 parishoners and listeners via satellite at the Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois and poured out his heart for his mistake with Monica Lewinsky.  It was one more valiant attempt to cleanse the stain from his less-than-honorable Presidency that barely survived impeachment.  George Stephanopoulos wrote in Newsweek about Clinton’s soulful outporing, “It was vintage Clinton: a synthesis of politics, theology, and pop psychology; saccharine yet sincere, self-referential to the point of self-pity and possibly politically shrewd.”

     Stephanopoulos reported that the person most upset by Clinton’s political/religious diatribe was the Vice-President.  “Just as Gore and Joe Lieberman are promising a fresh start, Clinton steps from the wings right into their spotlight.  Gore was seething, but what could he do?  Upstaged by the master . . . again.”

     Gore can take heart though that in eight weeks the American voters will select a new President, either Gore or Bush, one of which will then be sworn in as President in mid-January, just four months away.  Clinton’s eight years in the Oval Office will officially end.

     It was George Washington who established the precendent of serving only two four-year terms and then retiring, a precedent that remained until Franklin D. Roosevelt ran a third and even a fourth time for President.  To those who urged Washington to run for a third term, he turned a deaf ear.  The call of home at Mount Vernon he no longer could resist.  In fact, when first elected in 1788 in his inaugural voyage to New York City, he made it known at every stop that he accepted the Presidency out of a sense of duty and in spite of a deep desire to stay in retirement at Mount Vernon.

     Washington’s precendent to serve only two terms became the law when Congress officially ratified the Twenty-second Amendment in 1951.

     One thing Washington did though before heading home was to prepare his final parting words to his fellow citizens.  This document, called Washington’s Farewell Address, he dated September 17, 1796, but then he chose not to read it.  Instead, he delivered it to a publisher who printed it for distribution on September 19, 1796.  In it Washington warned future Presidents and Congresses to avoid entangling themselves in the alliances and wars and political intrigues of the rest of the world’s nations, especially with the European powers, and in retrospect, this was sound advice for the fledgling nation.

     Washington served his eight years and called it quits, so anxious was he to return home.  In contrast, Clinton does not seem to hear a clarion call to return to Little Rock;  I am not sure that he even has a home there to return to.  The last I heard was that he and Hillary bought a home in New York to establish residency for her run for the Senate.  And I am not sure he even wants to quit as President, but it is the law that he cannot run a third time.

     Knowing what we do about Bill Clinton, I do not think that we will see him go out with anything less than on front and center stage and in the spotlight.  In fact, we should anticipate more such speeches–his Farewell Addresses–similar to those at the Willow Creek Community Church.  These speeches will include more partial and haulting apologies for his sins with Monica Lewinsky and the ugliness of the impeachment proceedings, plus he will position himself and his eight years in the Oval Office in a more favorable and exemplary light for the historians’ kinder touch.

     I seriously doubt we will receive statesmanlike and quality advice similar to that which Washington delivered more than two centuries ago.  Instead, I think we can expect him to go out with a bang, frequently upstaging his replacement, for he will not go gently into that good-night.    

LABOR

by William H. Benson

August 31, 2000

     A hundred years ago management and labor fought a bitter war.  The workers struggled for a measure of collective power to ease their individual burdens.  They wanted safer and better working conditions, a shorter working day, the right to strike, and the right to create unions which could then collectively bargain for the individual members.

     On the other hand the robber barons–Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and the other owners of industrial America, feared a loss of their power.  Motivated by a prejudicial fear, management feared the foreigners who had just recently immigrated into the United States and had assumed the industrial jobs available.  After the Haymarket Square riot in Chicago in 1893, management was convinced that anarchists and communists had infiltrated the labor movement.

     This internal war unleashed extreme emotions and deep suspicions on both sides;  a flood of wild charges and counter charges erupted.  And it was a brutal war.  Strikes quickly deteriorated into aggressive battles.  Many strikers were killed, and many others were wounded.  The casualties were far in excess of those experienced in England or France or Germany.

     A hundred years removed from the labor strife, we can safely conclude that labor won that war.  Management eventually and over time relented and yielded to the workers.  Labor achieved most of their goals.  When the dust settled, people realized that management’s fears proved to be largely unfounded.  Civilization did not end.  The United States did not revert to anarchy nor communism.  Nothing disastrous happened.  In fact, productivity actually multiplied.  The war ended with scarcely a whimper. 

     Today management faces other problems, such as finding quality workers–those educated and trainable with good attitudes towards work.  For jobs are one of the measures of the success of any society.  When there is not enough work for everybody who wants to work, there are problems; and there are also problems when there is work enough but not reward enough.

     On the other hand, the workers, especially those with ambition, are constantly and justifiably pursuing better and better jobs, for work is not the curse, but drudgery is.

     I know it is a rhetorical question, but consider this.  Throughout the history of humanity, how many millions of men and women have been completely ill-suited for the jobs that they were forced into doing.  Surely among the workers of those Egyptian pyramids five millennium ago, there were men or women who would have preferred intellectual or office work, but unfortunately they never were given the chance.

     And how many since have groaned under boring and mentally-dulling physical work throughout their entire lifetimes when they would have thrived if thrown even a handful of mental challenges?  Or, for that matter, who has clung to the office or to the classroom when clearly their talent was working with their hands in the garage or the shop?  This all means “choice”.  It means matching human talent and natural-given ability with the job and approaches what Jefferson called “the pursuit of happiness”.

     Some time ago James Michener wrote, “For in American life, the average person can expect to work in three radically different fields before he retires.  The trained lawyer is dragged into a business reorganization and winds up a college president.  The engineer uses his slide rule for a short time, finds himself a sales expert and ends his career in labor relations.  The schoolteacher becomes a principal and later on heads the town’s car dealership. . . . Adults who are unwilling to reeducate themselves periodically are doomed to mediocrity.”

     Teddy Roosevelt said, “Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”  And Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote, “The right to work, I had assumed, was the most precious liberty that man possesses.”

     And so we pause and reflect on Labor Day, and think about a war fought a hundred years ago; labor won that war, but nobody really lost.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
by William H. Benson
August 17, 2000

He was born Napoleon Bonaparte on August 15, 1769 to Italian-speaking parents living in Corsica, an island in the Mediterranean, but it was in and through France that he achieved control of all of Europe. And he did that by the time he was 35 years old, and in so doing he became without a doubt the greatest military genius of all time.
At the military academy in Paris he attended while a teenager, he learned that he could be rebellious to authority and indifferent to the feelings of the other students and still “win”, for he could not stand to lose. Sure, he ended up friendless and alone, but relationships did not matter to him. Power was what he wanted. He admitted, “There is only one thing to do in this world and that is to keep acquiring more and more power.”

As a young general he lived life at full throttle in a hypomania frenzy, working 16 hours every day, riding horses until they dropped dead under him, hustling his armies at breakneck speed to battle after battle. While others fell away from fatigue, he kept charging on and on.

Napoleon saw the whole battle in his mind before he actually entered into it; his particular genius was to find his opponent’s weak point and then throw his entire army’s strength at that point until the opponent broke. The equilibrium was then tipped in his favor, and at that point he took complete advantage of the enemy’s relapse. Again and again he did this, and soon controlled all of Europe.
He was the first person diagnosed with a Napoleon complex–an egomaniac with a deluded opinion of himself. When he wanted something, he was extremely charming, convincing, and hypnotically captivating, and then people would give him whatever he requested.

At his own coronation as Emperor of France in 1804, he took the crown from the Pope’s hands and placed it upon his own head and then forced the Pope to fall to his knees and kiss Napoleon’s ring. Then, the 35-year-od Napoleon placed another crown upon Josephine’s head.

He took his armies wherever he wanted–to the pyramids of Egypt and even to Moscow. The world belonged to him.
But it was the British led by the Duke of Wellington who finally defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, and they immediately placed him in exile on an island, St. Helena, off the coast of West Africa where he lived for six years until dying from cancer at age 51. And all of Europe breathed a sigh of relief.

Prince Talleyrand said of Napoleon, “His career is the most extraordinary that has occurred for one thousand years. He was certainly great, an extraordinary man. He was clearly the most extraordinary man I ever saw and I believe the most extraordinary man that has lived in our age, or for many ages.”

Could humanity endure another Napoleon this century? Probably not. The world’s nuclear arsenal in the hands of a neo-Napoleon would doom millions, perhaps billions, of people. Personality and character often turn the course of human events, and the legal safeguards in place today which prevent a Napoleon from grabbing power could quickly crumble before someone so charming and so powerful. The tyrant, that larger than life person who promises everything, can convince the masses to follow him and that is usually into battle or a fenced-in camp.

Two weeks ago Anna Quindlen, the Newsweek columnist, suggested a trend. “Voters use their impressions of a candidate’s personality to choose a president.” ‘I don’t know why, I just like the guy’ is their reason for voting for him, rather than his voting-record, his achievements, or even his political philosophy. The cult of the personality dictates who gathers voter approval. Charm wins elections these days. She may be right.
The danger in all this so-called personality cult is apparant. If you combine this fixation on personality by the masses with a neo-Napoleon upstart, then conditions are extremely ripe for a demagogue to grasp for power, disregard the conventions of law, and soon he will be crowning himself emperor. It has happened before.

CAMPAIGNS

by William H. Benson

August 3, 2000

     Who do you like–Nixon or Kennedy?  In the close 1960 election Kennedy was given the win but only because he won Texas and Illinois.  Evidence existed that those electoral votes were fraudulently obtained.  And, Kennedy’s 112,803 margin in the popular vote over Nixon’s was, no doubt, a myth.  Paul Johnson, the historian, writes that Nixon actually won the popular vote by about 250,000, but that Nixon refused to contest the outcome.  So, Kennedy and Jackie moved into the White House.  Camelot had begun. 

     The best bumper sticker in 1964 was “I like AuH2O”, but not enough people did for Lyndon Baines Johnson completely crushed the Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in a lopsided election.

     During the following four years the Democrats slowly divided over what to do about the Viet Nam War.  Then, in November of 1967 Eugene McCarthy, the quiet and soft-spoken Minnesota Senator, announced he would run for President, promising that if elected he would end the war.  He gathered wide support among students and then won the New Hampshire primary, surprising the other hopeful Democrats.  At that point Bobby Kennedy decided to run, and he won in California, only to be assassinated on the eve of that victory in June of 1968. 

     The Democrats were then in a shambles, and the Chicago Convention turned ugly when Mayor Richard Daley called out the police to club and gas the anti-war demonstrators in Grant Park.  Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut even denounced the mayor from the podium for “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.”  Finally, the Convention selected Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s Vice-President, but Nixon, this time, won the election.

    In 1972 Nixon, the incumbent, won again but was so suspicious of McGovern throughout the campaign, to the point of paranoia, that he committed egregious mistakes culminating in Watergate.  Two years later he was forced to resign or face certain impeachment.

     The 1976 election ended in a big disappointment.  To many Americans it just did not seem possible that a peanut farmer from Georgia would succeed in the White House, and he failed miserably.  He bungled the economy, was hung in effigy by shouting Iranians, and then told the American people on national television that they suffered from a “national malaise”.

     The Republic Convention in 1980 focused on one theme, “No more Jimmy Carter!”  Almost 70-year-old Ronald Reagan burst on the scene, and told Americans that their greatest days were yet ahead of them.  He was right.  It seemed the right guy won this time.

     In 1984 Walter Mondale did not stand a chance.  He won his native state, Minnesota, and Reagan quipped, “I want Minnesota too.”

     George Bush wanted the White House so badly in 1988 that he resorted to playing dirty tricks on the defenseless Michael Dukakis.  The worst was when Bush accused the governor of Massachusetts of being soft on crime and releasing early prisoners who then committed more crimes.  The accusation focused upon a face–Willie Horton’s.  Dukakis did not stand a chance.

     In 1992 Bush tried the same tactics with the Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, but Bush had bumped up against someone much smarter and more wily and vastly more determined than Dukakis or even Bush himself.  Clinton described his style, “I just won’t ever give up!”  He won.

     Despite all of his private scandalous behavior, Clinton was easily re-elected in 1996.  Bob Dole’s starched white shirts, ties, and suits did very little to excite the younger Americans.

     Now this year, we have George W. Bush and Al Gore, and neither seem that exciting to either the young nor the old.  The others–Bill Bradley, Elizabeth Dole, Steven Forbes, have all fallen aside, defeated in the primaries.  The conventions this summer are designed to unite all the factions from each party behind one candidate and one party platform, and how successful the convention is in unifying the party will determine in no small part who will win.  The Democrats support Al Gore, and the Republicans have chosen George W. Bush; eventually the American people will have to face the unpleasant fact that one of them will be President in January.

1. K. ROWLING VS. U. S. GRANT

by William H. Benson

July 20, 2000

     Harry Potter made the cover of Newsweek this week with the release on July 8th of the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, in the seven-book series.  J. K. Rowling, a single mother who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, wrote much of the first Harry Potter book at a table in a neighborhood coffee shop while her daughter slept in the stroller.

     In her books Rowling creates a fantasy world;  Harry Potter is a teen-age boy, but he is also a Wizard and is invited to attend a school for Wizards called Hogwarts.  As an infant he was struck in the face and now sports, along with black-framed glasses, an ugly lightning-like gash down the center of his forhead.  His birthday is July 31st (the same day as Rowling’s), but there is also a Deathday Party, celebrated by a ghost on the anniversary of its death.  Rowling’s fantasy world includes its own vocabulary, its own code of behavior, and its own cast of characters.

     It seems the British write the best fantasy; J. K. Rowling fits into the category of fantasy writer along with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  Tokien’s Hobbit world and Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia still, after a couple of generations, captivate both the juvenile and the non-juvenile reader.

     Writing is solitary work.  It is selfish work.  It requires a ruthless demand for time alone.  A good writer pushes all else aside, including family and friends, for some time every day to write.  Few can do it.  Thousands of books are started every year, but only a small fraction are ever finished.  Rowling admitted that she was very happy when she finished the first Harry Potter book, because she had written two previous books and had failed to finish them.

     Recently, I read a biography on Ulysses S. Grant.  He was the great Civil War General, who displayed a remarkable determination and drive to win at all costs..  His classic line was that he intended “to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”  Prior to the Civil War he failed as a farmer, a clerk, and a peddler, and after the Civil War he was elected President and proved to be an inept bungler, imperceptive to the graft and corruption that permeated his White House.

     But the amazing part of his biography was what happened just prior to his death.  In 1884 he found himself penniless and was then diagnosed with lung cancer.  To support himself and his wife, Julia, that last year he began to write magazine articles of his Civil War experiences twenty plus years before.  Mark Twain read the articles and promised Grant that if he finished an entire work of his Personal Memoirs he would see that they were published.  Grant had never written anything before, but he took up the task with his usual characteristic stubborness.

     He wrote in longhand for a full year and pushed everything else aside, including his own burial.  He completed the two volumes, and less than two weeks later on July 23, 1885, he died.  True to his word, Mark Twain published Grant’s Personal Memoirs, and promptly paid Julia Grant $450,000, a huge sum for then.  The Memoirs fall into the same category as does Julius Caesar’s Commentaries, the best in a personal narrative of military exploits.

J. K. Rowling and U. S. Grant. One is British, and the other American.  One writes fantasy, and the other history.  One earns millions and much acclaim, the other dies never realizing what he had achieved.  The differences are so apparant.  But what they had in common was that selfish, almost ruthless, brand of determination to see the work finished.  One waited anxiously for her daughter to sleep in the stroller at a coffee shop so she could write, and the other virtually postponed his own burial until he had written “The End”.

     Grant said it best: “To fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”